by Tim Mohr
The band quickly developed a national reputation. They played at churches all over the country, headlining things like a peace workshop in Karl-Marx-Stadt. As the band played to bigger and bigger crowds, authorities began to make things difficult back in Frankfurt Oder—they were constantly detained and interrogated, and their parties were raided. Jörn became paranoid, often peeking out the window to see what cars were outside his place, what conspicuously inconspicuous agents were standing around. One night in 1986 he was on his way home on the back of a friend’s motorcycle when they were pulled over. They didn’t have their wallets. Jörn’s friend told the police he would go get his papers if they gave him a minute to grab them at home, just around the corner.
“What about me?” Jörn asked.
“Not you, Herr Schulz,” a cop replied. “We know who you are.”
The fact that the police in Frankfurt Oder recognized him by sight set off a new set of alarm bells in his head.
I’ve got to get out of here.
Soon after that Jörn fled.
Although it was illegal to change places of residence without permission, Jörn crashed with a girl he knew in Berlin named Ina. He never returned to Frankfurt Oder or saw his family again while the Wall was still standing. Instead, he and Ina squatted an apartment together in Friedrichshain, briefly married, and started working together on songs that would eventually form the basis of another band, Wartburgs für Walter. Kremer, Antitrott’s singer and guitarist, was already dating Tatjana, a member of the Berlin band die Firma, and playing in a side project with her; Kremer soon followed Jörn to Berlin. Reimo, the band’s drummer, was the last to make the move.
As the decade wore on and the legal obligation to work was no longer rigorously enforced, more and more people simply left the provinces and made for Berlin—or other cities where they could disappear and find their way in the cracks opening up, in the increasing amounts of free space being carved out of society in the big cities, in the squats, and in activities outside the official economy, like making clothing and jewelry for private sale.
By the second half of the 1980s, Esther Friedemann, the girl who had been jailed in 1981 for spray-painting anti-Wall graffiti, was making so much money selling hand-sewn clothing on the black market that she was able to buy a used Russian luxury car, a big fat Chaika GAZ. She made occasional trips to Czechoslovakia to buy fabrics, she used sheets and mattress covers from East Germany, and she repurposed materials from pre-War pieces she was able to get her hands on. For an investment of five or ten marks in materials, she could make a piece she could sell for a hundred marks. She hawked her fashions both to ordinary people, especially up on the Baltic coast during summer months, and to artists and officially sanctioned musicians who wanted out-of-the-ordinary clothing. In addition to Robert Paris, with whom she’d been jailed, Esther’s circle of friends included a round-faced, Mohawk-topped kid named Sven Marquardt, an aspiring punk photographer who made money selling his compositions as art postcards up at the Baltic beach towns.
Another source of off-the-books income in the late 1980s was smuggling. Despite the heavily fortified wall dividing the city, the two Berlins still functioned like border towns, even if it was a uniquely intimate and dangerous border they straddled. As in any border town, the discrepancies created opportunites for adventurous traders. The unlicensed punk band Der Demokratische Konsum, for instance, ran Russian military jackets to West Berlin, and had their runners—low-level diplomats—and other contacts in West Berlin buy Western porn magazines with the money; the porn mags were then traded to Russian soldiers in the East for more jackets, and round and round it went. They made so much money that some people in the scene assumed the members of Der Demokratische Konsum worked with the Stasi because of the way they lived—they were known for going into bars, often themselves dressed in Russian military gear, and ordering bottle after bottle of East Bloc champagne. At one stage they had three beautiful Tatra cars, outlandish shark-finned Czech sedans that looked like giant sci-fi versions of VW Beetles. The band was able to exist in a parallel world—which was, after all, the aim of many punks.
Another guy, Siegbert Schefke, found a gold mine in classical sheet music. He had Western family and friends bring over record albums, which he could sell in the East at an astronomical markup. He used some of the windfall to buy sheet music, which was very cheap in the DDR. He sent the sheet music back across the border, where it would be sold to piano and violin teachers at prices far cheaper than those offered by West German sheet music publishers. The West German teachers saved money and Schefke made a mint. Siegbert Schefke was no punk, but he was best friends with Carlo Jordan, the environmental activist and construction engineer at Zion Church. And he was wired into the scene enough to have Feeling B play his birthday party one year. Schefke ended up recording interviews with DDR punk bands and arranging to smuggle their music over to West Berlin for broadcast on a show called Radio Glasnost, a program devoted to the voices of protest inside East Germany and intended for Eastern ears. Schefke was ten years older than many punks—he was twenty-seven when, along with Jordan and others, he became a co-founder of the Umweltbibliothek, or Environmental Library, that opened in the basement of Zion Church in September 1986 and led to the on-site publication of the most famous East German samizdat periodical, the Umweltblätter, or Environmental Pages.
Schefke became a well-known figure to punks: Speiche, who worked for Jordan on the roof of Zion Church and was also involved with the Environmental Library, called Schefke “Media Siggi” because of all of the amateur-journalism operations he undertook. In 1989, Media Siggi would be the only journalist able to film the swelling street protests in Leipzig—his footage of the demonstration on October 9, 1989, which was smuggled out and broadcast on West German TV the next day, was seen throughout East Germany and is credited with helping to snowball the number of protesters during the final weeks of the dictatorship.
But in 1986 Schefke was still new to the underground scene. Three key experiences had led to his strident anti-government convictions: he had been kicked out of university for a year because he had signed a petition against the stationing of nuclear missiles in East Germany; he’d once had books he’d bought in Hungary confiscated at the East German border; and he had realized while serving his mandatory army service that he would never be willing to fight to defend the DDR. When he had finally finished his studies in 1985, he started working as a construction-site manager. It wasn’t long before he lost the job after getting detained at a political demonstration. By then he had accumulated so much money from his exploitation of the illegal border trade that he decided to risk not working to focus full-time on his primary goal: regime change.
You idiots just made a full-time revolutionary out of a nights-and-weekends revolutionary.
He loved pissing off the authorities, and he was sure that helping punk music get played on Radio Glasnost pissed them off. He was also convinced that the best way to effect change was to get attention for things happening in the opposition scene. In his mind, that was the way to make underground activity reverberate, the way to make the East German masses feel the ground shaking beneath the dictatorship.
Antitrott (from left: Reimo Adler, Thomas Kremer, and Jörn Schulz), ca. 1986
Private archive of Jörn Schulz
V
Burning from
the Inside
49
By the end of 1986, Berlin’s radical Open Work participants had set their sights on the following summer, when East Berlin’s Lutheran Church leaders planned to hold a national conference in Berlin from June 24 to June 28, 1987, hoping to attract tens of thousands of East German participants as well as international guests and media. Open Work wanted to stage a shadow event, an anti-event: the Church Conference from Below.
In reality it was a last-ditch plan. Berlin’s Open Work was dying—or really, being killed by the church itself. Open Work had been shut out of every church space in Berlin. Morale was
flagging as Open Work’s top goal—free space—seemed to slip further and further from their grasp.
But the official church conference inadvertently provided a perfect way to leverage support.
For several years church leaders had been wheedling the government for permission to stage a national conference to coincide with celebrations of Berlin’s 750th anniversary in 1987. It would be the first large-scale church conference in East Berlin since the building of the Wall. There had been quiet negotiations since 1984, and the church proved willing to sacrifice a lot in exchange for permission to hold the event. At an institutional level, the church seemed willing to pull the rug out from under groups the government found politically troublesome. Church officials had engineered the cancellation of a peace workshop scheduled for 1987, for example, as well as the Blues Masses. When environmental, human rights, and peace groups operating in churches around the country were denied inclusion in the national conference, it was seen as such a betrayal that Berlin’s Open Work had little trouble finding supporters for an alternative conference.
Walter Schilling, the minister who had created the Open Work concept in the southern state of Thüringen fifteen years before and was still an active figure among what the government considered the rogue elements of the clergy, went so far as to write a rousing essay in support of an anticonference.
“Many will probably take those who demand and work toward a Church Conference from Below for imbeciles who just want to vent their frustration, who just want to disrupt and endanger the official church conference or even the relationship between the state and church,” wrote Schilling. “People make problems because they themselves have problems—and at the same time, hope.” Behind the rebelliousness, Schilling heard screams for personal autonomy and self-determination, for love and solidarity, for a purpose in life, for happiness. He also wrote that such problems could not be dismissed as merely youth problems, that they were in fact societal problems—which made them problems for the church, too. “What good does it do the church to maintain its own little world if the cost is its soul?”
The punks had seceded from society, finding refuge in squats and churches and creating their own world; now Open Work in essence planned to secede from the church, which had gotten far too chummy with the government in the run-up to its national conference.
There were barriers. Space, for one. The point of the church’s concessions to the government was to sideline political groups and silence opposition, and Open Work—that fetid slop bucket of faithless punks and freaks, that rabble-rousing radically democratic cesspool—was seen as the worst example of such groups. There was no possible way the organizers of the official national conference would submit to Open Work demands aimed at disrupting the conference they had been working on for years.
It didn’t matter.
The concept for the anticonference began to solidify in March 1987. Concrete planning sessions began in April, followed by seven more sessions before the event itself. Starting with barely a dozen people, the planning group soon ballooned to a hundred and fifty, including participants from ten other cities. Within Berlin, the planners included large contingents from the Environmental Library and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, as well as people from the many small groups working out of city churches, such as peace groups from Pankow and Friedrichsfelde. On tap at the alternative conference: indoor and outdoor concerts, including an open-air headlining show by Antitrott with Kein Talent as support; readings; a play; photo and art exhibitions; discussions on such topics as East European opposition movements, Jesus-as-anarchist, and the political situations in South Africa and Nicaragua; information booths on environmental issues, the Environmental Library, and anarchism, among other things; and even a do-it-yourself printmaking stand where people could make posters with slogans like “We demand space for Open Work.”
The organizers expected to be able to attract about two thousand guests.
Any revolution needs to be financed and Berlin Open Work had found a champion in Schilling. He actually broached the topic of how to finance the conference before the issue occurred to organizers, and then Schilling volunteered to lend the Berliners 10,000 marks. A major hurdle had been cleared before they even realized it was there—now they could buy supplies, among other things. Two people stepped up to handle the finances for the conference. One was a guy named Silvio Meier, who like the members of Antitrott and countless others had recently made his way into Berlin’s underground scene from the hinterlands—in Silvio’s case, from Quedlinburg, a medieval town in Saxony-Anhalt, just north of the Harz Mountains. The other was Fatale guitarist Dirk Moldt, who also oversaw the publication of the mOAning Star newsletter. For years afterward people called Dirk “Millionaire Moldt” because of the finance role he played in the event.
Discussions at planning sessions created friction between the aggressive, action-oriented Open Work mob and other mostly older activists, who were steeped in a tradition that sought dialogue. The punks sometimes grew exasperated at what they regarded as endless waffling over every detail. At one meeting, Wolfgang Rüddenklau of the Environmental Library, then thirty-five, was leading a committee discussion aimed at hashing out a procedure for procuring a few thousand bockwurst to sell during the Church Conference from Below. Finally a punk named Matze stood up.
“That’s enough,” he said. “I’ll take care of the fucking bockwurst.”
The organizers had volunteers, financing, and bockwurst. What they still lacked was a location. They notified the church of their intentions during a regional synod meeting in late April and demanded a centrally located church with extensive outdoor space.
The response from church leaders: radio silence.
On May 14, 1987, Church Conference from Below organizers invited church leaders to the Environmental Library’s basement space and broke the news: if the church did not provide a centrally located building with extensive outdoor space, Open Work would squat one during the official church conference. Then they asked the church leaders to get out.
Open Work was betting that the church leadership would blink when faced with this proposal. After all, what would church leaders do if a church facility actually was squatted? Call in the police to empty it by force? During a national church conference, with international representatives and media in attendance?
Good luck, assholes.
The church took the threat seriously. Rainer Eppelmann, the minister at Samariter Church who had initiated the Blues Masses, figured his church might be the one targeted for squatting. He told a Church Conference from Below organizer that he would indeed call in the cops if they tried to stage the alternative conference at Samariter.
Still the church leadership did not budge.
The clock was now ticking as the official church conference was just weeks away.
50
In June 1987, U.S. president Ronald Reagan was scheduled to stop in West Berlin during the celebration of Berlin’s 750th anniversary.
The history behind the date of the anniversary was highly dubious. It was ostensibly tied to the first appearance of the name of the city in court papers—in 1237—in the course of a legal dispute between the church and a member of the local gentry over tithing. But as one underground newsletter in East Berlin remarked, 1987 was actually the 50th anniversary of a Nazi celebration of the city’s 700th anniversary. Prior to a 1937 celebration cooked up by the Nazi propaganda machine, the year 1237 had never been regarded as significant, since the known existence of settlements on the site preceded that date by centuries. Yet for some reason the date was resurrected in the 1980s. And once it was, the anniversary was—inevitably—taken up on both sides of the Wall, since neither East Berlin nor West Berlin was going to cede any aura of historical legitimacy to the other side.
West Berlin authorities were so concerned about the potential scale of anti-Reagan protests that they brought in additional police reinforcements from West Germany, putting 10,000 cops on the stre
et in full riot gear in the run-up to his visit. Municipal sources said it was the biggest security operation in the city’s history.
It’s easy to forget now, but under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the chance of a shooting war between the US and the USSR seemed more tangible than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. The world lived in the constant shadow of a genuine existential threat: total nuclear annihilation.
By the 1980s the possibility that humanity could be vaporized in a matter of minutes occupied a dark but prominent place not only in individual consciences but also, especially in the West, in pop culture. Not surprisingly, given the fact that their country was bristling with missiles and nukes and regarded as the likely flash point for World War III, West Germans seemed to have the most angst of this sort. A couple of huge international pop hits by German artists brought home the point. At first blush, Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” for instance, seemed to be a sweet ditty about typical teen yearnings. Except for one little thing: the reason we might remain forever young was because we could all be fried in a global blast of mutually assured destruction. Or take Nena’s “99 Luftballons.” One minute a couple is holding hands as they watch their balloons float into the sky; the next minute an early warning system picks up the dirigibles and triggers an all-out nuclear exchange. Then there were all the British bands with songs on the topic, many of them hits in West Germany and across Europe. Ultravox’s “Dancing with Tears in my Eyes” chronicled a couple’s final minutes on Earth before it goes up in flames; the Smiths’s “Ask” suggested the bomb would bring us together in a common destiny as radioactive ash; the Police’s “When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” described life in a fallout shelter; Kate Bush’s “Breathing” was narrated by a fetus with a somewhat improbable knowledge of fission reactions and their aftermath. There was Anne Clark’s “Poem for a Nuclear Romance,” the Sisters of Mercy’s “Black Planet,” the Cure’s “A Strange Day”—the list goes on and on.